Published on Monday, September 26, 2016 By Draginol In Sorcerer King Dev Journals

PC gaming, at some point in the past year or two, has changed from expecting expansion packs to be offered as an integrated product to demanding they be released as DLC. Sorcerer King: Rivals stumbled into this brave new world.

Our story so far:

Last year, we released a fantasy 4X/RPG game called Sorcerer King. It takes place in our Elemental game universe and is a combination of a 4X strategy game with RPG elements. It’s a really fun game. In that game, you start with a village in a world that has already been conquered by the title character. Seeing that the Sorcerer King now wants to become a god, you must raise up an army, gather allies and confront the Sorcerer King at his fortress. And, like I said, it was fun.

But, it had one big issue: Replayability. This wouldn’t have been a problem if it were a $15 game but in a $40 game that wasn’t a dedicated RPG, it was a problem. So over the past year, we thought about what we could do to address that. The solution came in 3 parts:

We needed to add more races to the game to play as

We needed to to make the neutral factions more relevant

We needed to give the player agency in the game: let them be able to win the game through their civilization

Ultimately, we combined this together into Rivals, an expansion pack.

Rivals

We’re very happy with how the game has turned out. There are a number of things on my wish list I’d like to add (in particular, I’d like to make the neutrals into major factions so that they too can try to become gods). But like all things, it depends on sales.

Mmm. Dungeons.

The first update

Today we released the first update to the game that fixes some typos and game balance stuff. I also made a few AI tweaks to make the neutrals more intelligent. I am hopeful that players will like what we’ve done with Sorcerer King: Rivals though the jury is out on that of course.

Let me know what your thoughts Sorcerer King: Rivals and what you’d like to see next.